Good afternoon, everyone. It's Brian Pitz from BMO's internet team, here at the Technology and Innovation Leaders Conference 2026. We're very pleased to announce our next guest, Jayme Mendal, the CEO of EverQuote. Jayme, thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having us.
Appreciate you making the trip. It's great to see the team here at EverQuote today. Hopefully, your meetings are going well. Maybe for those in the audience who are not as familiar with EverQuote, you could just spend a minute talking about your online insurance marketplace and the value proposition that you actually offer to consumers and to insurance companies, kind of two-sided.
Sure. EverQuote's a leading online insurance marketplace. We find consumers wherever they are on the internet with some intent to buy insurance. We get them to our web properties, primarily through paid programmatic advertising, and then we'll gather all the relevant underwriting data to then be able to match and connect them with the right insurance provider, subset of insurance providers for them. The value prop to the consumer is they save time and money when they shop or re-shop insurance by consolidating it all into one place. The value prop for providers is that we are a very large, highly targeted, high ROI source of new business for them.
That's great. I know just if you kind of look at your financial projections and goals, you got a $1 billion revenue goal being achieved or reached in the next one to two years. What do you see as the most critical components of your execution that will allow you to actually deliver on that goal?
Yeah. So, our business flywheel starts with provider performance. So, delivering high ROI to providers kind of begins there. We've rolled out a number of products over the years to effectively drive up that provider performance. Most recently, we've been focused on a product called Smart Campaigns. It's an AI bidding product whereby we'll take on the bidding activities on behalf of the carrier for each individual shopper that comes through. We'll set up a data feed and be able to sort of optimize accordingly. Typically, when a carrier adopts that, we'll see a step function improvement in their ROI to the tune of double digits, so 10%, 20% + in some cases. As the provider's performance gets better, they'll typically shift budget from other partners or other channels to us.
That budget allows us to go back into the traffic landscape through our programmatic advertising and either compete more aggressively in the channels we're in right now or expand into additional new advertising channels to get more volume of consumers. Then, that greater volume gives us more data, and that data allows us to optimize further. We do that across auto insurance and home insurance. So, the path to a billion is really predicated on continuing to sort of intervene at the leverage points of this flywheel, performance, traffic, and then using the data to continue driving performance.
Got it. At the $1 billion in EverQuote revenue, how much revenue are your partners on the P&C side generating, and how should we think about your take rate in the context of that?
Yeah. Typically, a carrier will invest call it 10%-15% of premium into marketing and distribution. That's more or less what we expect to see sort of towards the high end, but it's of the lifetime premium—
Right.
—that we're delivering them. It's fairly consistent over time. They kind of manage to these target ratios. As premium goes up, the amount they're willing to spend with us goes up proportionately.
I know, maybe kind of shifting gears to some of the more recent announcements. You launched Luva, I think it was back in October, which is an AI-native conversational insurance conversion platform. Can you talk about some of the initial traction you're seeing in Luva and how it fits into your broader AI strategy?
Sure. Luva was a response to the evolving landscape for shopping broadly. We launched and announced it just two weeks ago, so it's all very new in terms of the data. But it was purpose-built to meet the shopper where they want to shop and in the way that they want to shop. Historically, we've been focused on paid programmatic channels, and there's a certain experience that aligns well with the shopper who originates through those channels. Obviously, shopping activity is evolving, and now there's more and more consumers who are originating through LLMs. In an effort to meet those consumers sort of where they are inside of the LLM, we built Luva.
Luva's really built to access those shoppers, to show up in the LLMs through the content that we're publishing, through technical integrations with all the big platforms, through paid advertising within those LLM platforms. It's still early in terms of from a volume standpoint, but I think some of the early signal has been positive. We are earlier than we expected beginning to show in the LLMs and get cited and referenced. What we're seeing is the users who are converting at a higher rate are the ones that are actually originating from the LLM platforms as opposed to more traditional media.
The conversions are better? Can you give us a sense for how much better conversions are?
I think the data's still too early to sort of—
Yeah. [inaudible]
— to share.
Then maybe just thinking about the broader agentic question. We get this with some of our other coverage companies, right?
Yeah.
The disintermediation impact. Maybe just walk us through how you kind of think about that. Some of our companies are now all of a sudden deciding to shut off inbound agentic flow.
Yeah.
But maybe just kind of walk us through how you see the evolution of agentic within the insurance space online.
Yeah. I think the evolution in insurance will probably look a little different than a lot of other markets. It kind of begins with some of the dynamics that are unique to the insurance market. When Muse launched, it was probably a couple months ago now, we had been anticipating that for a while. We came out with a white paper of sorts that presented a point of view on how this may impact carriers over time and the options they have to respond to it. We have gotten a ton of engagement from the big insurance carriers on it. We have met with almost all the major carriers at this point. The things we have learned, or really confirmed, are as follows. Number one, I think that the carriers view agentic commerce, if left unchecked, as a significant risk.
There is a number of reasons for that. One is, you can imagine a future where these agents are shopping or re-shopping policies at every renewal cycle, so it is every six months or every year. The carrier's business is really built on LTV, right, and on a certain policy life expectancy. If that switching is happening every six months, it would be really detrimental to carrier economics.
Right.
Number two, the carriers for years, since digital shopping began, have resisted any kind of price comparison experience for the most part. That has not changed. The reason for that is they worry about adverse selection, and they feel the quoting and sales conversation really belongs with them or their agents to give a full picture to the consumer. The third thing is, there is a lot of gray area right now from a legal and compliance standpoint, right? A carrier last week gave us the example, like, okay, someone buys a policy or someone's agent buys a policy, their house burns down. They think they are covered. They are not covered, but their agent bought the policy, right? Whose problem is that?
[inaudible]
There's all these sort of questions or concerns. What that suggests to us is that the carriers are not going to move very quickly to really lean into this and to open up to the agents. Over time, I think they'll need to find a way. They'll need to strike the right balance because they will need to access the shopping volume that today is de minimis, but over time will start to grow. If you come over to the agent side, what are they solving for? They're trying to get the consumer the policy they need as efficiently as possible, in as streamlined a way as possible.
Today, what the agent does if you use Muse or something like this, it'll shotgun out to hundreds of different places to try and stitch together all this information, which is not being made readily available by the carriers. It's inefficient. It's ineffective because it doesn't actually capture a lot of the product that's out there. It's very costly. It could cost the agent tens, in some cases hundreds of dollars of compute just to do that single shopping event. Our view is, number one, I think this is going to take time in our market, probably longer than it takes for other markets to really reach any kind of critical mass. I think that's measured in years, not months.
Secondly, I think there's a role to play, and there will continue to be a role to play for a trusted intermediary, kind of like the role we've carved out in the existing incarnation of digital shopping. That is to say, I think we can create a centralized clearinghouse where the carriers can participate in a way that respects some of their requirements in terms of how and when their price is shown, to whom, what kind of verification is happening along the way, and solves for some pain on the AI platform side of things, where now that agent has a place they can go to get all the information they need in a very streamlined and efficient way, in a structured way. That's what we're pursuing.
There's a number of ways that it can ultimately take shape, but I think there's going to be a big opportunity for one or more kind of intermediary layers to continue to play a role in this market.
If you kind of look at this transition period that we're going through, right, what do you think EverQuote must do for the carriers so they prefer working with you than connecting directly, right? And what measurable result over the next year do you think would validate that role, essentially, that you could play?
Yeah, I think we've started to learn a lot about this through our dialogue with carriers as it relates to the launch of Luva.
Right.
Where you get into the sort of minutiae of it, and the first thing they worry about is compliance. So, okay, if you have a conversational buying experience, how much freedom does the LLM have to answer questions that the consumer is asking?
Right.
On certain questions, it can have free range. On other questions, it needs to be very deterministic based on a fixed set of answers. I think there's a compliance box that they need somebody to help them figure out how to check, and they're really wrestling with how to deal with that. The second is, I think it's going to be giving them some configurability in terms of, okay, shopper comes through, we've gathered some information about them. Do you want to participate in the sort of experience for that shopper or not based on their underwriting criteria? Do you want your rate to be shown? If so, when and where, and what other information needs to be shown? So giving them some control over that process, I think, will be a key to making it work.
Got it. Maybe just shifting over to the agentic commerce side, I know we talked about that in our last panel. How do you think it actually is impacting how consumers search and discover the different options that are out there? Is it something they try once and then they go back to how they were doing it, and how do you continue to position yourself in that? Because it seems like even with Muse, people use it for a couple things to clean up their inbox and then they do not really go back to it. Any other insights you are seeing on the shopping side?
I would say it is still early and the volume is still relatively low on the agentic piece specifically. Obviously, people are beginning their research and discovery more and more with LLMs, and I think you have got to be there to interact with those consumers in addition to everybody using all the other channels. On the agentic side, I think about it from the consumer standpoint. Insurance is a, it is kind of a high-stakes purchase. You really want to understand what you are buying. You have to reveal a lot of really sensitive information to actually consummate the purchase. I think there is a very large segment of the population that is not going to be comfortable turning over the personal data and the gravity, a decision of this gravity to an agent.
I think there will be a segment of consumers who are able to get comfortable with it more quickly. That is just half the battle, right? Then you also need the carrier side to enable an experience that is good enough that the consumer is able to actually get the job done through the agent, which is what we were talking about earlier.
Yeah.
It is for all these reasons, we are pretty confident. It is just going to take time.
It's going to take time.
Yeah.
Maybe looking at your core business, and your ability to cross-sell different types of insurance, specifically, auto into home growth, et cetera. Maybe you could comment on how successful that's been more recently.
Yeah. It's been successful. I mean, we, for a while now, have tried to understand the actual needs and intent of every shopper, right? If somebody came in shopping for auto insurance, do you have a need for homeowners coverage as well? That's sort of our job in the value chain, is to uncover that intent, and then we feel the actual, like, bundling and cross-selling conversation belongs with the carrier. What we'll do is we'll expose that intent to the carrier or the local agent, and then be able to price it accordingly, because somebody who wants to bundle is more valuable than somebody who doesn't. The actual cross-sell conversation will happen once we hand off the consumer to the provider.
Maybe, we only have a couple minutes left here. I just want to make sure if there's any questions in the audience, raise your hand if you want to ask Jayme a question directly. David?
Thanks. Hello? Is this on? There we go.
Yes.
You talked about the importance of LTV for the carriers, and if you're doing your job, they're going to stay with these carriers for a long time. Just help me understand how customers who find insurance through you guys continue to come back in the future and your ability to retain them for future insurance purposes.
Yeah. So typically, the first time they'll find us, it's through a paid ad. Now, with some of our newer products, we'll be discovered within the LLMs as well. They'll come through, they'll typically get an insurance policy, they'll save some money. We have historically not invested much in brand, in the EverQuote brand from a consumer standpoint, but we do quite a bit of remarketing. A material portion of our revenue comes through remarketing, which is repeat users who are re-shopping over time. So we have a very, very large customer database that we're constantly kind of reactivating, and that's typically how they would come back and find us.
Maybe just wrapping up our last question, what do you think are the biggest investor misperceptions about EverQuote, and what are you also most excited about as you look ahead into the future?
Yeah. I think the first one is, most investors believe that the market is probably more cyclical than it in fact is, because the last hard market cycle that we went through, which is when pricing and sort of claims losses get out of whack, was coming out of COVID. It was a black swan event, and it was a very abnormal hard market cycle. Typically, we would not see that kind of compression in future cycles. I think that's a misunderstanding. There's a little bit of recency bias to suggest that future cycles may look like the previous one. The second thing is, I think there's just this misperception around the likely impact of AI and agentic commerce in our value chain, in the P&C insurance value chain. We think there will be a role for trusted intermediaries in this go-forward value chain.
To your question around opportunity, I think that is the biggest opportunity in front of us. I think a lot of investors are nervous because they don't understand what that's going to look like. I think as we gain more visibility and more clarity, we're gaining conviction that there's actually a huge opportunity for us.
Awesome. Well, Jayme, thank you so much for your time—
Thank you.
for joining us today. Really appreciate it. Thank you.
All right. Thanks. Appreciate it.